The $6T Barrier Holding Electric Cars Back

> I look forward to no longer having to deal with the absurd complexity of the internal combustion engine: pistons, cylinders, crankshafts, distributors, oil pumps, water pumps, radiators, valves, belts, mufflers...

I'm looking forward to pervasive electric cars as well, but really how much of this 'absurd complexity' do you need to deal with in a conventional car? And how exactly do you have to 'deal with' it? You get a mechanic to look at for a couple of hours once a year and that's it.

You could dramatically list all the complex components in an electric vehicle - down to the microscopic integrated circuits - as well and say that they all need to be 'dealt with' because it's serviced once a year.

You are swapping what is ultimately a stupendously simple mechanical system where any given garage worker can reliably identify the cause of faults for one with unassailable complexity on circuit boards where a single transistor failure can mean loss of all forward movement and the only economic repair will be "swap the board".

I think as humans we have a better chance of making the circuit board more reliable than the assortment of mechanical gadgets in a modern car, but independent repair is dead.

You look forward to "not having to worry about" a healthy network of independent service and parts manufacturers and instead pay 3x as much to have a service technician press a button to allow your car to continue operation every year until it reaches the planned obsolescence age and the manufacturer forces you to discard your perfectly functional car for "safety reasons"?

You do realize an electric vehicle has a radiator, right? Gotta keep the battery and cabin cool. This argument is so overdramatic and persistent that it sounds like astroturfing from a PR shop. A modern car can run for a decade or more with even modest maintenance. My next car will probably be electric, and it’s purely an economic decision. I’ve never touched my cars crankshafts or mufflers, and it isn’t a hassle to own one. When my cars have issues, it’s the sunroof, the cheapo “luxury” interior finishes, the infotainment system controls. Rarely do I have a true mechanical failure. The IC engine is a modern marvel, not a horse shitting in the street, and an electric drive vehicle is also complex. To the end user, both electric motors and gas engines accelerate when you press the pedal, and my experience doesn’t really change beyond either I plug my car in every night or get gas every week.

From Tesla forum: The Tesla thermal management system is fairly complex, using a compressor in a standard cooling cycle to provide cooling for cabin air, battery, and motor. Each of cabin, motor and battery have their own sealed coolant loops, but are thermally connected together by heat exchangers and in some cases, by fluidic valves. Two of the coolant loops use radiators and coolant very similar to what ICE cars have.

(Edited this comment extensively for completeness.)

Occam’s razor: it’s not profitable enough to attract the capital it needs, and price is heavily regulated

The assumption you used helps to answer your question.

"at a profitable rate"

So this assumes that the chicken-and-egg electric car/infrastructure can evolve together profitably while reaching critical mass. (To be sure, I believe they can, but it will take either government or brave investors to get there.) So the question really is "can $6T be divided up into the cost of whoever is paying for it, i.e. electricity users to maintain profitability as it is built?"

If you assume the answer is yes, there is no question!

(As for the "maintaining the grid", yes, obviously we are already maintaining it profitably. No need to build critical mass/adoption or initial infrastructure investment, so no interesting stories to write!)

The comment is dead because all comments posted by the account are posted as dead. It isn't flagged at the moment.

Try to leave the whinging about your comment getting flagged or whatever out.

>The issue is, as long as electric are priced above or similar to conventional cars, is and will continue to be, superior demand.

Tesla's sales prove you wrong: people are already replacing their current ICEs with higher-priced EV, although on a /km basis, the Model 3 is already cheaper than an equivalent ICE (e.g the BMW Series 3). We just need Tesla to ramp up its production and introduce economy models, and the other manufacturers to try to compete.

I am not saying that you can buy a low-cost EV for your needs/budget, but that your first 3 assertions are plainly false.

> There are people outside cities. Lots of them. Stop pretending we don't exist, and calling us rednecks/flyover/etc. Its become a staple of HN and getting worse.

Spillover from the culture war, sadly. So long as you're prepared to make it a two-way street and understand urban problems and environments, things needn't be this way. It's probably related to how many far-right politicians seem to come from the more rural states.

A change like the transition to EV won't be linear. As more ICEs get replaced by EVs, people and businesses will realize that it doesn't make sens to sustain an aging ICE infrastructure for a shrinking fleet of old, toxic cars. Dense cities will gradually ban them, gas stations and car dealerships will close, banks will stop financing ICE leases (and more important, they will stop financing the entire fossil fuel industry), etc.

As the resale value of ICEs will plummet and their cost of ownership/operation will increase, a vicious circle will accelerate to quickly make them a liability.

I have no comment on whether the grid can support the electricity demand. The charging network is the bigger picture item. Basically, locations where you can charge your car have to become as ubiquitous as gas stations, or, more likely, more ubiquitous because you want to rely on dormant vehicle periods to charge to avoid humans standing around waiting.

It's very easy to picture this in a modern metro area which probably already has a well-planned (and mostly Tesla) charger network. But just the U.S. alone has 2.3 billion acres of land to cover with chargers at homes, businesses, parking garages, apartments and dedicated charging points. It's not trivial, and it absolutely does not yet exist.

(But I believe it's a surmountable business/engineering challenge, if not an expensive one.)

This issue is very complicated.

Your average make-tiny-explosions-in-a-chamber based vehicle can give you about 250,000 to 1 million km (150k-625k miles). Then it's just done. The parts are worn down. It's given its all.

Your average move-power-from-batteries-to-engines based vehcile can EASILY keep on going for 10 million km or more. Yes, even the battery pack can get there, though it would indeed be by far the first thing that will fail. It is far cheaper to replace that, than to replace an entire combustion engine.

Given that, you could draw the conclusion that the energy required to make the chair, the radio, the dashboard, etc – can be divided by at least 10, probably more.

But your average person does not ride more than ~250000 KM in a decade, and for sheer matters of safety engineering, style, conveniences like supporting modern electronics – most people consider a 10 year old car pretty old, and a 20 year old one ancient, and want to replace it simply because it is old. Which, for combustion cars, is not a big deal: It's pretty worn down by then.

But for EVs? That's a real problem. A 20 year old EV with 250k on the odometer is a damn shame. Nobody wants it anymore but all the parts still work.

Solve this problem and EVs are _INCREDIBLY_ better for the environment.

I guess self-driving cars helps; you can share a car and just order it to drive to your front door. But to make that a success, you need to do something about the 9-to-5 culture; people need to go to work, say, anywhere between 7am to 1pm, work 6 to 8 hours, and return home, and any job that needs full staffing the entire time people are at the office needs 2 shifts. That's a huge social upheaval (but it also gets rid of traffic jams, creates jobs, and probably boosts the economy because it is easier to do stuff because things are still open).

At which point we're in 'change the world, man!' hippie territory.

But one can dream, I guess.